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Competing Legacies, Competing Visions of Russia: The Roerich
Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia John McCannon
In Ten Days That Shook the World, his classic account of the
Russian Revolu-tion, journalist John Reed noted dryly that, in
Petrograd, the year of 1917 was “a particularly active season for
Theosophists.”1 Reed’s implication—that alter-native belief systems
flourish in times of social and political instability—holds just as
true for Russia’s post-Soviet aftermath as it did for the period of
tribula-tion that preceded the USSR’s birth. During the long
transition that began with the glasnost’ campaign of the late 1980s
and continues to the present day, a combination of excitement,
curiosity, uncertainty, and frustration has sparked a widespread
spiritual revival among contemporary Russians, causing many to
embrace not just conventional religion in the form of Orthodox
Christianity, but a tangled variety of mystical, esoteric, and
occult practices.
Of these, among the most successful, and yet most controversial,
has been the movement—more precisely, the cluster of
movements—dedicated to the teachings of Nikolai Roerich [Rerikh]
(1874–1947), the prominent Silver Age painter who, in emigration,
gained fame for his peace activism and his artistic-archaeological
expeditions to Asia, and, with his wife Helena [Elena], created the
Theosophically-derived doctrine of Agni Yoga, known also as the
“system of living ethics.” Roerichism draws advantage from its
association with a versa-tile, internationally-known celebrity, as
well as its exceptional doctrinal elastic-ity, which allows the
views and enthusiasms of a wide variety of adherents to be
accommodated.2 In particular, Roerich’s vision of a morally pure
Russia, con-nected organically to Asia and the Christian world by
virtue of its geographic position, holds enormous appeal for those
who seek a belief system that sus-tains them spiritually and
reinforces their sense of self-worth as Russians, but who, for
whatever reason, derive little satisfaction from Russian Orthodoxy.
Also, the Roerich family’s ambiguous relationship with Soviet power
has made
1 John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (London: Penguin,
1986), 38. 2 I use the term “Roerichism” as an umbrella term to
include all spiritual outlooks that involve a
meaningful degree of admiration for Roerich. I interpret “Agni
Yogist” to mean someone pur-suing a narrower and more dedicated
commitment to the “living ethics” (zhivaia ėtika) out-lined in the
Roerichs’ 14-volume “Agni Yoga” series.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 349
it unusually, if not uniquely, viable for Roerich to be adopted
as an object of admiration by Russians who reject the country’s
Marxist-Leninist past and by those who mourn communism’s
demise.
On the other hand, that same ambiguity contributes to the many
contro-versies that have surrounded Roerich movements since the
collapse of the Soviet regime. Astoundingly for someone so famous,
some of the most basic facts of Roerich’s life story remain the
subject of intense debate, none more so than the question of his
poorly-understood collaboration with the Soviet re-gime, and
whether this involved espionage or, as seems far likelier, a more
tentative and less successful interchange. Not only have these
debates affected Roerich’s reputation among the Russian public,
they have caused rifts among those actively dedicated to Agni Yoga.
Other issues bedeviling the Roerich movements include disputes over
institutional and doctrinal authority, compe-tition over
custodianship of Roerich’s art and the family’s personal effects,
public condemnation of the Roerichs by the Russian Orthodox Church,
and, most profoundly, a failure to arrive at a unified
understanding of Roerich’s vision for Russia, its future, and its
place in the world. This essay will trace the explosion of public
interest in Roerich that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
along with the rise of Roerichite groups and circles, including the
Inter-national Center of the Roerichs (MTsR) in Moscow. It will
also address the controversies outlined above, especially the
unceasing struggle to resolve com-peting articulations of
Roerichism.
The Roerich Revival and Russia’s Transition from Communism
As described in Markus Osterrieder’s chapter, Roerichite
currents flowed through the Soviet Union following the artist’s
rehabilitation—and the return of his older son, the orientalist
George, or Iurii—in the late 1950s.3 Roerich was restored to the
canon of great Russian artists; during the Cold War, he served as a
useful symbol in depictions of the USSR as committed to world peace
and to fraternal relations with Asia, thanks to his lifelong
advocacy of the Banner of Peace Pact (also known as the Roerich
Pact), whose purpose was to protect art
3 At the invitation of Nikita Khrushchev, Iurii Roerich returned
to the USSR and took up a
position as a Tibetologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1958, a major exhibition of Roerich père’s paintings was held in
Moscow, and cautiously sympathetic reviews such as N. Dmitrievna,
“Vystavka proizvedenii N. K. Rerikha,” Iskusstvo 8 (1958); and N.
Sokolova, “Re-rikh,” Oktiabr’ 10 (1958), signalled his artistic
rehabilitation. Also see Birgit Menzel’s chapter in this
volume.
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350 John McCannon
in times of war, and to the many years he and his family resided
in India.4 Be-tween the 1960s and the 1980s, key centers of
Roerich-related activity cropped up in Riga, Tallinn, Izhevsk, and
Novosibirsk, and the 1974 centennial of Roer-ich’s birth unleashed
a flood of commemorations and publications dedicated to him,
including a library of standard biographies and collections of his
writings.5
Still, if Roerich’s influence flowed readily, it did not do so
with complete freedom. His expeditions were portrayed as strictly
artistic and scholarly en-deavors, and allusions to the political
motivations underlying them were risky—as was open discussion of
Roerich’s mysticism, which had to be kept as rarefied and abstract
as possible, with emphasis on “universal profundity” and “keen
insight” into the philosophies of the east. There was no room for
talk of the Roerichs’ past as Theosophists and mediums, nor was it
safe to study Agni Yoga as an esoteric doctrine, as demonstrated by
the 1979 crackdown visited upon Academy of Sciences scholars in the
Novosibirsk suburb of Akadem-gorodok, where a subgroup of the
city’s large Roerich circle tried to promote Nicholas’s and
Helena’s thesis from the 1920s about the reconcilability of Agni
Yogist mysticism and Marxist-Leninist communism. “Your Blavatskian
ten-dencies have placed our institute in a difficult situation,”
the authorities thun-dered as they forced recantations all around.
“If you wish to continue being considered communists, you had
better rethink your position.”6 The state responded similarly in
Izhevsk, where, in 1983, a member of the local Roerich group
claimed to be receiving psychic sendings from Shambhala.7 At
roughly the same time, poet Valentin Sidorov stirred up a public
storm by publishing his Roerich-inspired travelogue Seven Days in
the Himalayas (Sem’ dnei v Gi-malae) in the journal Moskva.
All this changed in 1987, when sponsorship from the highest
levels of 4 On the Roerich Pact, see Mark Boguslavsky, “Legal
Aspects of the Russian Position in Regard
to the Return of Cultural Property,” In: The Spoils of War, ed.
Elizabeth Thompson (New York: Abrams, 1997); and Karl Meyer,
“Limits of World Law,” Archaeology 48 (July-August 1995), 51. Many
works, including biographies of Indira Gandhi and various
collections of let-ters, attest to Roerich’s friendship with
prominent Indians, including Jawaharlal Nehru and the poet
Rabindranath Tagore.
5 See, for example, N. K. Rerikh, Iz literaturnogo naslediia
(Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1974); idem, Izbrannoe (Moscow:
Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1978); A. D. Alekhin, Nikolai Konstanti-novich
Rerikh (Moscow: Znanie, 1974); and Katalog khudozhestvennykh
proizvedenii N. K. Re-rikha s 1885 po 1947 gg. (Novosibirsk,
1974).
6 Igor’ S. Kuznetsov, Inakomyslie v Novosibirskom Akademgorodke:
1979 god (Novosibirsk, 2006), passim.
7 Roman Lunkin, “Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” In: Sovremennaia
religioznaia zhizn’ Rossii, vol. 4, ed. Michael Burdo and Sergei
Filatov (Moscow: Logos, 2006), 20.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 351
Soviet leadership raised Roerich’s prestige to unprecedented
levels. That year, after a May 14 meeting with Roerich’s younger
son, the artist Sviatoslav, Mik-hail Gorbachev began speaking with
approval about the “Roerich idea,” prais-ing the Roerich family as
“cultural pillars” and “outstanding representatives of our
country.”8 Gorbachev and his wife Raisa enjoyed a warm relationship
with Sviatoslav, and Raisa, who grew up in the Altai region (where
Roerich’s mem-ory is particularly well preserved) and greatly
admired Indian thought, is ru-mored to have sympathized with Agni
Yoga, speaking in her own autobiogra-phy of Roerich’s “wisdom.”9
More than that, Gorbachev wished to use the “Roerich idea” to
revitalize a Soviet ideology whose symbolic force had been
exhausted by overuse and public cynicism dating from the stagnation
(zastoi) of the Brezhnev era.10 Gorbachev appears to have
calculated that Roerichite thinking, properly packaged, would
infuse the Soviet worldview with a potent combination of
aesthetically-appealing and exotic imagery; a pride in Russia that
was neither chauvinistic nor at odds with the multiethnic nature of
the Soviet state; an associative link between the USSR and respect
for the ideals of peace, culture, and beauty; and the possibility
of spiritual enrichment without the need for conventional religious
faith. In October 1989, Gorbachev, sup-ported by Sviatoslav and the
academician Dmitrii Likhachev, the government’s chief adviser on
cultural affairs, allocated funds for the creation of a Soviet
Roerich Foundation to locate and gather Roerich’s art, manuscripts,
and be-longings, and a Center-Museum to stimulate Roerich
studies.
The driving force behind both bodies’ work was the
Center-Museum’s head, Liudmila Shaposhnikova, an indologist and
journalist with powerful connections among the Soviet elite and a
personal acquaintance with Svia-toslav Roerich dating back to 1968.
In 1990 and 1991, Shaposhnikova estab-lished cooperative ties—for
the moment—with Roerich societies throughout the USSR and in
Bulgaria, Australia, Mexico, Canada, Germany, and Switzer-land, as
well as with India’s International Roerich Memorial Trust (which
held responsibility for maintaining the family’s former residence
in the Kulu valley village of Naggar) and the Nicholas Roerich
Museum in New York. In May 8 Pravda (May 15, 1987). Also Bernice G.
Rosenthal, “Introduction,” In: The Occult in Russian
and Soviet Culture, ed. Bernice G. Rosenthal (Ithaca/NY: Cornell
University Press, 1997), 29. 9 Raisa M. Gorbacheva, Ia nadeius’
(Moscow: Kniga, 1991), 135–140. Also Sylvia Cranston,
HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky
(New York: Putnam, 1993), 551–152; and Newsday (December 5,
1989).
10 On the weakening appeal of Soviet symbology under Brezhnev,
see Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial
Society—The Soviet Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), passim.
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352 John McCannon
1990, with the aid of Iurii Vorontsov, the USSR’s deputy
minister of foreign affairs, and with Sviatoslav’s apparent
blessing, Shaposhnikova scored a major coup by recovering from the
Roerichs’ home in Bangalore, India, a treasure trove that included
432 paintings, several tons of books and letters, numerous objets
d’art, and at least a portion of Nicholas’s and Helena’s funerary
ashes.11 These materials were formally presented to the Soviet
people on October 9, 1990, the 116th anniversary of Roerich’s
birth.
But by this time, the Roerich revival, as with so many glasnost’
initiatives, was going farther, and in different directions, than
Gorbachev had intended. In keeping with the general interest in New
Age practices that blossomed during the last years of the Soviet
period, many of Roerich’s admirers became more boldly and openly
occultist—as witnessed, for example, by the strong Ro-erichite
orientation of the Russian Theosophical Society, reconstituted in
1990–1991 after a seven-decade hiatus. Also, conceptualizations of
Roerich diversified, making it difficult to settle on the single
“Roerich idea” that Gorba-chev had originally envisioned. Certain
leaders had connections with the Ro-erichs that rivalled
Shaposhnikova’s and could therefore claim equal right to interpret
the family’s teachings and desires. The founders of the Siberian
Ro-erich Society, Natalia Spirina and Boris Abramov, had studied
with Roerich himself in Harbin, Manchuria, during the 1930s, and
Pavel Belikov, the long-time head of the Estonian Roerich Society,
had corresponded with him during the 1940s. Prominent members of
the Moscow Roerich Society, founded in 1990–1991, had similar ties:
the artist Boris Smirnov-Rusetskii had been a member of the
Amaravella school inspired by Roerich in the 1920s and 1930s, and
had met Roerich in 1926, while the indologist Natalia Sazonova had
known Sviatoslav Roerich almost as long as Shaposhnikova had.
Finally, in ways that presaged the quarrels of the post-Soviet
1990s and 2000s, institu-tional imperatives threatened to clash:
leaving aside the works held by collec-tors and galleries in
America, India, and Europe, many of Roerich’s paintings, designs,
and belongings were held by various museums in Russia, including
the Tretiakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Bakhrushin
Theatrical Mu-seum, numerous regional museums (especially the
Novosibirsk Picture Gallery), 11 Irma Mamaladze and Liudmila
Shaposhnikova, “Nasledie Rerikha,” Literaturnaia gazeta 22
(May 30, 1990). Also see Maria Carlson, ‘No Religion Higher Than
Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922
(Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 196, 246; and the
foreword to K. N. Riabinin, Razvenchannyi Tibet (Magnitogorsk:
Am-rita-Ural, 1996), 22–25. According to Rae Barkley of the
Institute for Visionary Leadership, a Roerich-oriented retreat in
Northfield, Vermont, some of the Roerichs’ ashes remained in In-dia
(interviews with the author, winter 1998–1999).
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 353
the Izvara Estate-Museum outside St. Petersburg (the country
retreat owned by Roerich’s family during his childhood), and, most
important, the State Mu-seum of Oriental Art (MOOA, today the
Museum of the East). Each had its own stake in how the Roerich
revival worked out.
All the same, it appeared in 1990 and 1991 that some degree of
coherence and cooperation would prevail, with the Soviet Roerich
Foundation and its Center-Museum providing leadership and
coordination. In March 1991, the first All-Union Meeting of Roerich
Societies—attended also by foreign repre-sentatives, including from
the Nicholas Roerich Museum (NRM) in New York—agreed to transform
the Center-Museum into the International Center of the Roerichs,
which would manage a new Roerich Museum and a charitable fund to be
named after Helena Roerich. The MTsR’s first president was Iurii
Vorontsov, who used his UN connections to have the Center named an
associ-ate organizational member of UNESCO. Shaposhnikova took the
posts of MTsR director and Roerich Museum head, and also the
presidency of the He-lena Roerich Fund. Over the course of the
year, the MTsR acquired as its home base the sumptuous Lopukhin
Estate on Malyi Znamenskii Lane, only a short distance from the
Kremlin Embankment and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. All this
transpired against the backdrop of the USSR’s final disintegration,
and it was only in December 1991, on the very eve of the Soviet
Union’s final dis-bandment, that the MTsR formally registered
itself as a legal entity.
Uncertainty and Diffraction: Roerich Movements during the
Yeltsin Years
One of the most vivid manifestations of early post-Soviet
Roerichism involves the famous Altai pilgrimages that began in 1991
and peaked in 1992, sparked by expectations that a great flood was
soon to engulf Eurasia, leaving only the Altai Mountains unscathed.
To ensure humanity’s survival into the next cos-mic era, a number
of Roerichite communes established themselves in the Altai,
although few lasted for long. Not only did the awaited deluge fail
to occur, but the pilgrims were constantly divided by arguments
about the nature of their mission—particularly about whether the
“radiant city” of Zvenigorod that Roerich had wished to build in
the Altai would miraculously appear if their faith were strong, or
whether they would have to erect it themselves before the flood
poured down.12
12 NRM director Daniel Entin, interviews with the author
(October 1999). Also see Lunkin,
“Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” 24.
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354 John McCannon
This episode illustrates not just how dedicated to Roerichite
ideas many Russians were during the 1990s, but also how difficult
they found it to arrive at a consensus about those ideas. In many
ways, this was a function of the prob-lem that arises whenever one
tries to gauge the nature and intensity of a spiri-tual belief: as
William James outlined multiple varieties of the religious
experi-ence in his classic 1902 book of that title, we can
recognize many varieties of the occult experience, ranging from
casual dabbling to dogmatic adherence to a single discipline. Four
to five hundred Roerichite groups and circles (many of them small
and loosely organized) formed in Russia during the 1990s;
unspeci-fied thousands practiced on an individual basis, and
scholarly estimates of those “captivated” in some way by Roerich’s
“unique philosophy” have run to “the millions.”13 Especially in the
last case, it is hard to determine how much Roerich’s popularity
rested on non-spiritual factors, such as interest in his
uniquely-styled art, patriotic admiration for him as a historically
significant Russian, or popular perception of him as a Gandhi-like
symbol of transcendent humanitarianism. But even looking strictly
at those to whom Roerich appealed on spiritual grounds, we see a
huge diversity, both in their level of commitment to Roerichism and
in what form their Roerichism took. As in the West, there emerged
in post-Soviet Russia an “increasingly complicated cacophony of
spirituality,” to borrow from a New York Times discussion of
contemporary American religion14—and, for many Russians, Roerichite
spirituality was merely one item for purchase in the growing
marketplace of esoteric practices, often blended syncretically with
Zen, yoga, Theosophy, astrology, and Ve-danta, not to mention
indigenous or conventional faiths like shamanism or Christianity
(despite the Orthodox Church’s constant denunciation of New Age
trends). Simply to revere Roerich did not necessarily make one an
actual Roerichite.
Even when it did, there was never anything clear about what it
meant to practice Roerichism. Like the Theosophy from which it
sprang—frequently described by scholars as “intellectually
undisciplined” and “promiscuous[ly] hospita[ble] to symbols”15—Agni
Yoga is a sprawlingly eclectic and protean system of belief,
complicated all the more by the way the Roerichs themselves
13 Rosenthal, “Introduction,” 29; quote from Roman Lunkin and
Sergei Filatov, “The Rerikh
Movement: A Homegrown Russian ‘New Religious Movement’,”
Religion, State and Society 28, no. 1 (2000), 136.
14 Charles Blow, “Paranormal Flexibility,” New York Times
(December 12, 2009). 15 Carlson, “No Religion”, 22-25; and John
Ransom, speaking of Theosophy in The Permanence
of Yeats, ed. James Hall and Martin Steinmann (New York:
Collier, 1961), 90.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 355
constantly changed their political and philosophical views. It
is often observed that Agni Yoga can adapt to “any school of
thought,” be it “ecology, astrology, vegetarianism… Buddhism,” and
so on—but so can many alternative belief systems, and the question
goes beyond that.16 Roerichism is so riddled with inconsistencies
and so susceptible to selective, decontextualized readings that,
out of it, numerous lines of thought can be spun, few having much
to do with each other, and many in direct opposition. This
certainly took place during the perpetually shifting and often
disheartening sociopolitical circumstances of the Yeltsin years,
when Russians turned in any and all directions for psychological
and spiritual comfort. Depending on how it was tailored, Agni Yoga
could appeal to the right or the left, to Russophile chauvinists or
peace-loving inter-nationalists. It spoke to savior-seeking
messianists, pantheists wishing to per-ceive divinity in the
natural world, intellectuals who agreed with Roerich’s emphasis on
the societal importance of culture and the arts, and atheists
look-ing for a more philosophically austere metaphysics. It
resonated with those who expected the future to unfold
apocalyptically and with those who expected it to do so
noospherically.
A broad church indeed was needed to bring together so many
different out-looks, and yet the only body with a chance of
succeeding—the International Center of the Roerichs—failed in that
task, thanks largely to doctrinal and institutional
high-handedness. With unyielding zeal, MTsR director Liudmila
Shaposhnikova insisted on the Center’s exclusive right to codify
and publish the Roerichs’ writings; by compiling fresh editions of
Nicholas’s and Helena’s essays, letters, and diaries—the “Great”
and “Small” Roerich Libraries (Bol’-shaia Rerikhovskaia biblioteka
and Malaia Rerikhovskaia biblioteka)—the MTsR sought to control the
production of a new canon that would have the authority of
scripture. Most of all, Shaposhnikova claimed that the line of Agni
Yogist authority descended directly to her from the departed
Roerichs and their masters, Morya and Koot Hoomi. Those who refused
to accept this “truth,” she maintained, were not legitimate
Roerichites.17 Not surprisingly, such fiats sat poorly with many
others in the Roerich community, including some otherwise inclined
to agree with Shaposhnikova on questions of interpretation.
16 Lunkin, Filatov, “Rerikh Movement,” 147–148. 17 These views
are set out and periodically updated on the MTsR’s website
(www.icr.su), particu-
larly in the “Zashchita imeni i naslediia Rerikhov” section, as
well as the MTsR journals Mir ognennyi and Kul’tura i vremia. See
also Daria Kucherova, “Art and Spirituality in the Making of the
Roerich Myth,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Central European University,
2006); and Lunkin, “Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” 36–37.
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356 John McCannon
A canny and well-connected operator, Shaposhnikova worked on
several levels to define the “Roerich idea” to her liking and to
the MTsR’s advantage. Among committed Roerichites, she asserted as
dogma the status of Nicholas and Helena as ascended masters,
saint-like entities in a pantheon of prophets and teachers similar
to that found in Blavatskian Theosophy and the Baha’i faith.
Building on the artist’s own claim that his paintings had healing
powers, she proclaimed that Roerich’s art was imbued with a
positive, life-giving force. Helena received greater attention than
during the Soviet period as the primary author of the Agni Yoga
books, and Shaposhnikova, emphasizing the physical suffering Helena
endured during her lifetime, in the form of migraine head-aches,
back pain, and cardiac palpitations, depicted her as a martyr who
al-lowed rays of energy to pass through her—virtually as though she
had been crucified—“in order that the normal balance of energy on
our planet might be restored.”18 Shaposhnikova purported to be in
psychic communion with the Roerichs’ spirits, making her the
earthly executor of the couple’s will: a high priestess in all but
name. She promoted the same eschatological scheme that Helena had
preached after Roerich’s death and right before her own, according
to which the battle of Armageddon had been fought during World War
II and had ended with the withdrawal of Lucifer from the solar
system in October 1949. Maitreya, Buddha of the Future, was
enthroned in Shambhala; at some point in the coming century, he
would reveal himself, ending the epoch of Kali Yuga, the age of
discord, and inaugurating the bright era of Satya Yuga. No
discussion of political scandal, or of any topic that might call
into question the MTsR’s carefully-cultivated image of the Roerichs
as invariably virtuous, was permitted.
In the public sphere, Shaposhnikova concentrated less on
esoterica and more on Roerich’s stature as a great Russian. The
MTsR made no secret of his mysticism—several rooms in its museum
are quite shrine-like, including the entryway, with a plastic
“crystal” lit from within by an electric “fire,” and the Hall of
Living Ethics—but defined it in vague and beatific terms, not
cultish ones, and pointed out how he fit into Russia’s long
tradition of cosmist and supernaturalist thought, with reference to
Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, and to Silver Age thinkers
like Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Berdiaev. Stress was placed on
Roerich’s intellectual versatility (with frequent comparisons
to
18 Quotation from Zashchitim kul’turu (Moscow, 1996), 83, as
translated by and cited in Lunkin,
Filatov, “Rerikh Movement,” 144.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 357
Leonardo da Vinci19); his profound insight into nature’s
inherent sacrality (he was touted as an early environmentalist, and
Anatolii Boukreev, the finest Russian mountaineer of his
generation, spoke with feeling about his ability to “sing of
Himalayan beauty”20); the scholarly value of his 1925–1928 and
1934–1935 expeditions, which were portrayed as “bedrock”
contributions to archaeo-logical and ethnolinguistic understandings
of Asia (even though academically useful results were meager and in
fact belonged to Iurii, not Roerich senior)21; his pronouncements
about the role of culture in bringing humankind closer to its
cosmic destiny (presented as desperately-needed wisdom in a world
overrun by materialism); and, most of all, his abiding love for
Russia, along with his conviction that it was the messiah among
nations (although Shaposhnikova continued the time-honored strategy
of keeping silent about Roerich’s ever-changing feelings for Soviet
Russia).
In many respects, this approach paid off. Public regard for
Roerich grew. One particular bonus was the deep and longstanding
respect for him that Iurii Roerich had managed to foster among the
USSR’s scholarly elite upon return-ing to work for the Soviet
Academy of Sciences in the 1950s and 1960s. This, combined with the
generally greater open-mindedness of Russian academics and public
intellectuals to paranormal speculation and noospheric
theoriza-tion, as described by Birgit Menzel in her chapter of this
volume, ensured Ro-erich a higher degree of credibility among
Russia’s scientists and literati than he has tended to have in the
West. Another asset was Shaposhnikova’s network of connections
among the press and in the government. A Communist Party stalwart
dating back to her student days at Moscow State University,
Shaposh-nikova had been a member of the Union of Soviet Writers and
the Union of Soviet Journalists, and her orientalist studies
acquainted her with many who went on to become highly-placed
diplomats and ambassadors in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Owing
to the incomplete turnover of political elites follow-ing the
collapse of the USSR, this left her with extensive contacts within
the Yeltsin regime, most notably Evgenii Primakov, who served the
new govern-ment as head of foreign intelligence, foreign minister,
and prime minister. 19 For example, Evgenii Matochkin, Kosmos
Leonardo da Vinchi i Nikolaia Rerikha: khudozhest-
vennye paralleli (Samara: Agni, 2002). 20 Anatoli Boukreev,
Above the Clouds (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), 111, which is
adorned
throughout with Roerich’s Pax Cultura symbol and epigraphs from
his book Shambhala. 21 The “bedrock” quotation comes from the Times
Atlas of World Exploration (New York:
HarperCollins, 1991), 222. On the Atlas’s board is Gennadii
Leonov, curator of Tibetan and Mongolian art at St. Petersburg’s
Hermitage Museum, and the most likely source for this overdone
assessment.
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358 John McCannon
Shaposhnikova could count on positive media coverage from many
outlets as well. Raising Roerich’s profile became all the easier
with such useful friend-ships at one’s disposal.
Not for long, however, did the MTsR stand unopposed. While
Roerichite groups in the majority of Russian cities remained loyal,
as did foreign partners in Bulgaria, Latvia, Ukraine, and Belarus,
resentment of Shaposhnikova flared up in key centers, for three
main reasons. First, the MTsR’s campaign to enlarge its collection
of Roerich’s art brought it into conflict with other muse-ums,
particularly the Museum of Oriental Art, which, thanks to a 1974
gift from the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York (and other
bequests in the 1980s) owned nearly 300 paintings by Roerich and
his son Sviatoslav, includ-ing Roerich’s prized “Architectural
Studies” from 1903–1904. Argument about these works began in 1991
and continued throughout the decade, causing MOOA director Vladimir
Nabatchikov to oppose the MTsR institutionally, and a number of
Roerichites associated with the MOOA, among them Ol’ga Rumiantseva,
Ekaterina Sheveleva of the “Roerich House” cultural center, poet
Valentin Sidorov, and Natalia Sazonova of the Moscow Roerich
Center, to ally with him. The MTsR lobbied the Yeltsin government
intensely and received vocal support from Moscow mayor Iurii
Luzhkov, but the Russian Ministry of Culture upheld—and continues
to uphold—the MOOA’s position (this caused the MTsR’s museum to
erect a “wall of shame,” castigating all of Yeltsin’s min-isters of
culture, especially the long-serving Evgenii Sidorov; only in the
follow-ing decade was this odd display taken down).22 In the
process, the MTsR an-tagonized the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New
York, as well as the deputy
22 The MTsR has based its argument principally on a claim that
Sviatoslav Roerich, who died in
January 1993, had bequeathed his family’s “legacy” (nasledie) to
the Soviet Roerich Founda-tion, whose work the MTsR was continuing.
However, Sviatoslav’s widow, the Indian film star Devika Rani
Roerich (d. 1994), stated in 1993 that her husband had wished the
inheritance to go to a state-run museum in Russia or be returned to
India—and the museum of the MTsR had never been recognized as an
official state institution. Not only was the MOOA a state mu-seum,
the MTsR was relying on a highly dubious claim of “moral right” in
insisting that Svia-toslav’s wishes had any bearing on art
bequeathed to the MOOA in the 1970s and 1980s. Complicating the
question further were questions about whether the Soviet Roerich
Founda-tion had violated Indian law by airlifting so many of the
Roerichs’ possessions to Moscow in 1990 (the 1972 “Antiquities and
Art Treasures Act” forbade the export of any artifacts owned by the
family that were more than one hundred years old, and, because
Roerich had been de-clared a “National Treasures Artist” by the
Indian government in 1979, export of his art was likewise against
the law), as well as the appearance of Devika Rani’s relatives from
an earlier marriage as possible heirs. See interviews with NRM in
2002; and Lunkin, “Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” 22–23.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 359
director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for
Oriental Studies, Rostislav Rybakov.
A second source of friction was the MTsR’s reaction to the
appearance dur-ing the 1990s of previously unknown or unpublished
manuscripts that prom-ised to shed new light on the Roerichs’ lives
and careers, including the journals of several people who followed
or traveled with the family, including Sina Fos-dick (Zinaida
Lichtmann), Dr. Konstantin Riabinin, Pavel Portniagin, and Colonel
Nikolai Kordashevskii.23 The emergence of these texts caused the
MTsR a great deal of anxiety, revealing as they did a number of
personal and practical details that contradicted the Center’s image
of Nicholas and Helena as politically-innocent saints. That anxiety
helps to explain the fury with which the MTsR waged its next
struggle, which had to do with the right to publish the diaries of
Helena Roerich. Written down in nearly fifty notebooks, Helena’s
diaries ended up in America, with the original held by the Amherst
College Center for Russian Culture, but with photocopied and
electronic versions widely available. By the mid-1990s, plans were
in place for the Sfera publishing house, led by Dmitrii Popov,
formerly of the reestablished Russian Theosophi-cal Society, to
annotate and publish the diaries with assistance from the NRM in
New York. Shaposhnikova took legal action, blocking publication for
more than ten years (it is proceeding now under the editorship of
the Museum of the East’s Vladimir Rosov) and embroiling Sfera and
the NRM in a barrage of lawsuits that were accompanied in the early
2000s by political pressure and, according to rumor,
behind-the-scenes threats. The Sfera affair reinforced the growing
impression that the MTsR was prepared to interfere at will with
aca-demic work on Roerich, and it wedged the Center even farther
apart from the MOOA, the RAN’s Institute of Oriental Studies, and
the NRM; by 2002, it caused a rupture between Shaposhnikova and
Nataliia Spirina of the Siberian Roerich Society, who had tended
earlier to be more or less in line with Shaposhnikova on matters of
belief.24
Thirdly, opposition to Shaposhnikova arose not just among
Roerichites who found her too fundamentalist, but also among those
who considered her 23 Zinaida G. Fosdik [Sina Lichtmann], Moi
uchitelia: po stranitsam dnevnika, 1922–1934 (Mos-
cow: Sfera, 1998); Konstantin N. Riabinin, Razvenchannyi Tibet
(Magnitogorsk: Amrita-Ural, 1996); Pavel K. Portniagin,
“Sovremennyi Tibet. Missiia Nikolaia Rerikha. Ėkspeditsionnyi
dnevnik, 1927–1928,” Aryavarta 2 (1998): 11–106; Nikolai
Kordashevskii, Tibetskie stranstviia polkovnika Kordashevskogo (s
ėkspeditsiei N. K. Rerikha po Tsentra’noi Azii) (St. Petersburg:
Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999).
24 For Spirina’s complaints, see Nataliia Spirina, “Skazhem
pravdu!” Na voskhode (November 24, 2002).
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360 John McCannon
not fundamentalist enough. Many of these complaints came from
groups who based their theology on the pro-Soviet writings of the
1920s, when Nicholas and Helena penned paeans of praise to Marx and
Lenin and foretold the syn-thesis of Buddhism and Soviet communism.
Roerich societies in Tomsk, Vol-gograd, Lenin’s birthplace of
Simbirsk, and Vladivostok (where, much to the MTsR’s consternation,
Roerichite leader Mikhail Lunev claimed to be in psy-chic contact
with the Roerichs) took Shaposhnikova to task for downplaying this
aspect of Roerich ideology, and all of them became active in the
1996 presidential elections, supporting Gennadii Ziuganov and the
Communist Party.25 Other organizations felt that they should be
more forthright about the supernaturalist side of Agni Yoga. This
was the case with the Karelian circle led by the cosmist Iurii
Linnik and the Crown of the Heart movement in Barnaul, although the
most outspoken of the independent movements has been the Bazhov
Center headquartered in Cheliabinsk and led by Vladimir Sobolev,
who considers himself the reincarnation of Confucius and has
several times predicted not just the return of Zoroaster (who will
be enthroned in the an-cient temple site of Arkaim), but the
outbreak of a third world war that will destroy Europe and America,
leaving Russia to rule the earth.26
As if all this were not enough, the MTsR had to contend with
outside pres-sures that made it increasingly difficult to manage
Roerich’s public image. Shaposhnikova might prefer to remain silent
about the political side of Ro-erich’s career, but a host of
revelations from formerly-inaccessible Soviet ar-chives, in
combination with the new sources described above, confirmed what
had already been suspected or partly-known for years: namely, that
Roerich’s 1925–1928 expedition involved an attempt to convince the
USSR to support the artist’s “great plan” of creating a
pan-Buddhist confederation encompass-ing Tibet, Mongolia, and parts
of Siberia (in exchange, he offered to gather intelligence and
propagandize the virtues of communism among the Buddhist peoples of
Asia), and that his 1934–1935 expedition—and much of the ac-claimed
work he did on behalf of the 1935 Banner of Peace Pact—had to do
with trying to sway either Japan or the U.S. to help him do the
same thing, but now with an anti-Soviet slant. Western scholars had
mooted these possibilities for decades, but Russian authors shied
away from them until the early-to-mid-1990s, when an array of works
touching on these themes began to burst onto
25 Lunkin, “Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” 38–40, 50–52; Lunkin,
Filatov, “Roerich Movement,” 144–
146. For an MTsR complaint about Lunev’s insistence that he was
in communication with the Roerichs, see “Ostorozhno, Lunev!” Mir
ognennyi 19 (1998).
26 Lunkin, “Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” 40–50.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 361
the Russian scene. The most dramatic was the series of articles
published by Oleg Shishkin in the newspaper Segodnia in the autumn
of 1994 and later ex-panded into book form, arguing that Roerich
had become an agent for the USSR as early as 1919–1920 and that the
rest of his career was tied up with service as a Soviet spy in the
full sense of the word.27 Shishkin’s maximalist interpretation was
based on incautious readings of sources that call out for careful
interpretation (such as confessions extracted from prisoners
interro-gated by Stalin’s secret police), and many particular
points have been called into question or disproven. Still, the
process of inquiry he helped open up has been carried on by
formidable researchers like Aleksandr Andreev and Vladi-mir Rosov,
and has brought much valuable information to light.28
It also had a potentially electrifying effect on public
perception of Roerich, especially in conjunction with another
bombshell of the mid-1990s: the Ortho-dox Church’s war on Agni
Yoga. This was part of a larger effort on the part of the Church,
which had anathematized all forms of occultism in 1932 and again in
1944, and which found itself appalled at the upsurge of New Age and
occult-ist trends in Russia during the 1990s.29 Starting in 1993
and 1994, the Church
27 Oleg P. Shishkin, “N. K. Rerikh v ob’’iatiakh ‘naglogo
monstra’,” Segodnia 208 (October 29,
1994), 13; idem, “N. K. Rerikh: ne schest’ almazov v kamennykh
peshcherakh,” Segodnia 222 (November 19, 1994), 13; idem, “N. K.
Rerikh: moshch’ peshcher,” Segodnia 237 (December 10, 1994); idem,
Bitva za Gimalai. NKVD: magiia i shpionazh (Moscow: OLMA, 1999).
Among those following Shishkin’s line are Anton Pervushin,
Okkul’tnye tainy NKVD i SS (Leningrad: Neva, 1999); and Richard
Spence, Red Star over Shambhala.” New Dawn Maga-zine 109
(July-August 2008). The MTsR’s response to Shishkin’s work has been
blistering; see its website, as well as A. Stetsenko, “Byl li
Nikolai Rerikh sotrudnikom spetssluzhb?” Pravda (June 6, 2003).
28 Works on (or dealing in part with) Roerich informed by
non-partisan and/or in-depth archi-val research include Vladimir
Rosov, Nikolai Rerikh: Vestnik Zvenigoroda, 2 vols. (Moscow - St.
Petersburg, 2002–2004); Aleksandr Andreev [also publishing as
Alexandre Andreyev], Vremia Shambaly (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2004);
idem, Soviet Russia and Tibet: The Debacle of Secret Diplomacy
(Leiden: Brill, 2003); Karl Meyer, Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament
of Shad-ows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia
(Washington, D.C.: Counter-point, 1999); Andrei Znamenski, Red
Shambhala. Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia
(Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 2011); Markus
Osterrieder’s chapter in the present volume; John McCannon, “By the
Shores of White Waters: The Altai and Its Place in the Spiritual
Geopolitics of Nicholas Roerich,” Sibirica: Journal of Siberian
Studies 2 (October 2002), 167–190, among other articles; and Anita
Stasulane, Theosophy and Culture: Nicholas Roerich (Rome: Pontifica
università gregoriana, 2005).
29 As the Osterrieder chapter in this volume notes, the Roerichs
themselves were hard-pressed to cope with the Church’s hostility to
occultism. Aside from the fact that they cherished Russian
Orthodoxy as an essential aspect of “Russianness” and as a
legitimate reflection of the higher
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362 John McCannon
included Agni Yoga in its attacks on “pseudo-Christian,
neo-pagan, and oc-cultist sects,” undermining the Roerich
movement’s attempt to portray Nicho-las’s and Helena’s teachings as
culturally and spiritually compatible with Rus-sian Orthodoxy.30
Wielding the heaviest cudgel was deacon Andrei Kuraev, whose many
anti-Roerich publications include the 1,000-page Satanism for the
Intelligentsia: On the Roerichs and Orthodoxy, from 1997, which
charged Ro-erich with espionage, quasi-Nazism, and the production
of bad art.31 In Janu-ary 1999, a Church conference on
“Totalitarian Sects in Siberia,” held in the Altai town of
Belokurikha, declared that “the dissemination of the Roerichs’ Agni
Yoga that has taken place with the support of state leaders evokes
our horror… we declare that Roerich’s teachings are not only
incompatible with Christianity but directly inimical to it.”32
With clockwork predictability, the MTsR responded by becoming
more combative than ever. Adopting as its motto the catchphrase “we
shall defend the Roerichs’ legacy,” the Center lashed out at all
who spoke of the Roerichs in less than ideal terms, denouncing any
criticizm, be it scholarly or ecclesiastical, as defamation and
libel. The term “legacy” took on a twofold meaning, refer-ring not
just to the art and heirlooms that the MTsR was so determined to
acquire and control, but to the Roerichs’ good name, which the
Center was prepared to safeguard with Cerberus-like vigilance. In
her most strikingly suc-cessful exploitation of government
connections, Shaposhnikova persuaded Evgenii Primakov to transfer
Roerich’s secret police file from the archives of the former KGB to
the MTsR. And to Shishkin, Rosov, Andreev, and other authors
writing about the Roerichs without the Center’s imprimatur, she
threw down the gauntlet, declaring it an “abomination” to speak of
Nicholas and Helena without reverence, as if they were “mere
historical figures.”33
truths revealed in the “true religion” they believed themselves
to be espousing, they sought White Russian backing for their “Great
Plan” between 1928 and 1935—one of their anti-Communist phases—and
did not wish to alienate any potential supporters. Accordingly,
dur-ing these years in particular, Roerich placed special emphasis
on St. Sergius as a motif in his art and essays, and was anxious to
portray himself as devoutly Orthodox.
30 Proceedings of the Bishops’ Council of November-December
1994, as recorded in Arkhiereiskii sobor RPTs (Moscow, 1995).
31 Andrei Kuraev, Satanizm dlia intelligentsii: o Rerikhakh i
Pravoslavii (Moscow: Otchii dom, 1997). Also see idem, Vse li ravno
kak verit’? (Moscow, 1994); idem, Ob otluchenii Rerikhov ot Tserkvi
(Mstitslav’: Prosvetitel’, 1995); and idem, Khristianstvo i
okkul’tizm (Moscow, 1997). Also see Rachel Polonsky, “Letter from
Peryn,” Times Literary Supplement (June 7, 2002): 5.
32 “News about Religion in Russia,” www2.stetson.edu/~psteeves/
relnews/ 9903a.html 33 See the “Zashchita imeni i naslediia
Rerikhov” section of the MTsR website; as well as Ku-
cherova, “Art and Spirituality,” 309–311.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 363
Imperfect Consolidation: Roerichism in the Twenty-First Century
Whether or not the dictum holds true that bad publicity is better
than no pub-licity at all, the abovementioned scandals did not
prevent Roerich’s fame and popularity from soaring even higher in
the 2000s than they had during the 1990s. The number of active
Roerichites is estimated to have grown, with the quantity of
circles and groups rising to several thousand, and that of
individual followers to at least the tens of thousands.34 More than
that, though, the level of generalized and informal admiration for
Roerich skyrocketed in the new cen-tury.
Much of this had to do with the booming international market for
fin-de-siècle Russian art over much of the decade. As part of this
overall trend, Ro-erich’s paintings fetched unprecedentedly high
prices at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and elsewhere, a fact that
redounded to his credit at home.35 Many Roerich works were
repatriated, as in 2007, when the famed Rostropovich-Vishnevskaia
collection—which included Roerich’s Treasure of the Angels
(1905)—was purchased by tycoon Alisher Usmanov and installed in St.
Peters-burg’s Constantine Palace.36 Beyond that, in what might be
termed an M. C. Escher or Maxfield Parrish effect, Roerich’s
unique, eye-catching style contin-ued to earn him a much higher
degree of popular recognition among the wider public than any
number of artists from his time who are treated with greater
seriousness by art historians.
Much more crucial was the way Roerich became linked in the
public mind with the confidence of an economically healthier and
more assertively nation-alistic Russia—due somewhat to general
circumstances, but also to assiduous image maintenance on the part
of Roerichite institutions throughout the coun-try, especially the
MTsR. Roerich centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg became steadily
more entrepreneurial in making themselves part of Russia’s
expanding tourist infrastructure; starting in 2001, a state
museum-institute dedicated to the Roerich family was established in
St. Petersburg, with the assistance of St. Petersburg University
and Liudmila Mitusova, daughter of Helena Roerich’s favorite
cousin, the composer Stepan Mitusov.37 MTsR activ- 34 Lunkin,
“Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” 52. 35 In 2006, Roerich’s Lao-tse (1924)
went for $2.2 million at Sotheby’s New York, making it the
top earner in a 589–lot sale of Russian art that brought in $54
million total. See Russian Life 49 (July-August 2006), 11.
36 St. Petersburg Times (May 16, 2008). The Guardian (September
18, 2007), referred to Treasure of the Angels, valued at £1.2
million, as one of the collection’s “star pieces.”
37 Ironically, the St. Petersburg State Museum-Institute of the
Roerich Family is located in the
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364 John McCannon
ism helped to ensure that Roerich’s name appeared as far and as
wide as possi-ble: on the hull of a naval vessel in Russia’s
Pacific Fleet, as the designation of planetoid #4426, and as the
name of a peak in the Altai. Roerich’s Banner of Peace flag, with
its symbol of three crimson orbs, was carried to the top of Mount
Everest, flown into space by the shuttle Columbia, and displayed
aboard the Mir International Space Station. The Center also
continued its cozy rela-tionship with Russia’s state authorities.
Moscow mayor Iurii Luzhkov re-mained an ally, and President
Vladimir Putin has spoken frequently and effu-sively about
Roerich’s importance as an artist and philosopher. Also, during the
first half of the decade, the federal procuracy took up the MTsR’s
case against Sfera, and the Administration for the Prevention of
Economic Crimes (UBEP) charged Dmitrii Popov and Daniel Entin with
conspiring to cause economic harm.38 The prominent Master Bank,
which uses Roerich-inspired logos, bankrolls much of the MTsR’s
publishing activities.
Not that the MTsR was completely triumphant. More and more,
regional groups found it in their best interest to conform to the
MTsR’s line, but not always. Tensions persisted between the MTsR
and the Siberian Roerich Soci-ety, and outright war continued
between the Center and the Museum of the East (as the MOOA renamed
itself); the MTsR’s animosity toward the NRM still burned as well.
Externally, the Church’s campaign against Roerichism took its toll,
despite the ironic fact that the two worldviews increasingly
converged during the decade in their Russophilia and, as cultural
critic Rachel Polonsky puts it, in their insistence that “the West
has defiled Russia’s sacred space and led her away from
salvation.”39 The irony is physical as well: the reconstructed
Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the most visible symbol of
Orthodoxy’s post-Soviet resurgence, stands a two-minute walk from
the MTsR—close enough for the two institutions quite literally to
hurl imprecations at each other. (Church criticism remains a sore
point with Roerich admirers, even less pug-nacious ones; the
response is generally to argue that Nicholas and Helena re-mained
Christian, but, like Tolstoy in his later years, had a purer
understand-ing of the faith than did the Church, or to maintain—as
does the St. Petersburg Museum-Institute of the Roerich Family—that
the family never abandoned
former home of Mikhail Botkin, Roerich’s worst enemy during his
years as an employee of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement
of the Arts. The museum’s website is www.roerich. spb.ru. .
38 Author’s interviews in October 2002 with staff of the
Nicholas Roerich Museum. Lunkin, “Rerikhovskoe dvizhenie,” 23,
mentions how the MTsR also turned to Putin, with less success, for
help in its dispute with Moscow’s Museum of the East.
39 Polonsky, “Letter from Peryn.”
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 365
Orthodoxy at all.40) The MTsR created an additional firestorm
between 2005 and 2007, when Vladimir Rosov, whose penetrating
examinations of Roerich’s political ambitions had caused the Center
great embarrassment since the 1990s, completed the dissertation
“Nicholas Roerich’s Russian-American Ex-peditions to Central Asia
in the 1920s and 1930s,” in fulfillment of his higher doctoral
degree. Even though Rosov had the backing of thirty academicians
and doctors of historical science, the MTsR, joined by a host of
other Ro-erichite organizations, launched fierce attacks on him in
the press, seeking to discredit the October 2005 defense of his
dissertation with accusations of “defi-cient scholarship” and
deliberate “slander.”41 For more than a year, the furor over
Rosov’s dissertation became a cause célèbre of nationwide
proportions; in the end, Rosov’s foes failed to block him from a
successful second-stage de-fense in the spring of 2007.
To some extent, the MTsR’s shrillness of tone and the continuous
rehash-ing of the oddities and mysteries surrounding Roerich’s
career have damaged the artist’s credibility; there are plenty who
roll their eyes or shake their heads at the mention of his name,
and the slang term rerikhnut’sia, coined during the 1990s and
punning on the verb rekhnut’sia (“to go crazy”) shows every sign of
surviving into the new century. All the same, the prevailing view
of Roerich is in many ways as the MTsR and its allies would have
it. Followers ignore any-thing unflattering about Roerich, and
non-followers, even when they are aware of such things, tend not to
dwell on them. The MTsR’s signal accomplishment during the Putin
years has been to formulate in the public mind an equation of
Roerich with “Russian-ness” (russkost’) without sacrificing his
usefulness as a symbol of universal peace and multicultural
tolerance. Roerich’s paintings are held up as testaments to the
unique virtue of the Russian land, and even his mysticism, properly
framed, plays well to the longstanding Slavophile stereo-type that
many Russians have of themselves as spiritually richer and more
intellectually flexible than close-minded, narrowly empirical
materialists in the
40 The latter point is made in the display notes—and was pressed
upon me vehemently by a tour
guide—at the St. Petersburg Museum-Institute (interview of May
2008, name withheld). 41 Note that Rosov already possessed a
kandidatskaia degree, the equivalent of a Ph.D. in the
West; the Russian doktorskaia degree carries greater weight. A
sampling of attacks on Rosov, or discussion of those attacks, can
be found on the MTsR website; “Kul’tura, ne politika… K voprosu o
neudachnoi dissertatsii o Nikolae Rerikhe,” Literaturnaia gazeta
(September 26, 2006); “Ėtika lzhenauki” and “Staroe pod maski
novogo,” both in Novaia gazeta (November 23, 2006); and “Zaiavlenie
Sibirskogo Rerikhovskogo obshchestva po povodu doktorskoi
dis-sertatsii V.A. Rosova,” Voskhod 156, no. 4 (2007): 15–18.
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366 John McCannon
West.42 In this context, any questioning of Roerich’s worth as
an artist or a thinker, or of his wider motivations (especially by
foreigners, or based on re-search done in foreign archives), could
be construed as an insult to Russian pride—a discursive approach
that served Roerichites well in a Russia governed by a more openly
nationalistic regime than before, and eager to reject the
per-ceived humiliations heaped upon it by the West during the years
of shock-therapy transition to capitalism. Some Roerichites have
taken this line of rea-soning to egregious, if not disturbing,
extremes: the Roerich society in Sochi blames “anti-Russianism” in
the West on the influence of Jews and Masons, and Roerichite
cultural critic Ksenia Mialo has named J. R. R. Tolkien, the
Catholic Church, the “judaic media,” “global capital, NATO, and the
Internet” as “implacable enemies of the pure ‘Russian soul’.”43 On
a related note, neo-Eurasianists such as Aleksandr Dugin have
encouraged a free-floating associa-tion between Roerichite thought
and their own quasi-millenarian vision of a Russia rising to glory
over the “Atlantic” West, although this is not an associa-tion
sought by the MTsR or Agni Yogists in general.44
And yet Roerichism can also be used to buttress Russia’s
self-presentation as a nation with natural ties to cultures in the
east, most particularly the Bud-dhist peoples of Central Asia and
the Russian Federation itself, not to mention India. Whatever
scholars may say about the authenticity or inauthenticity of
Roerich’s Buddhist pretensions, or of his affinity for other
Asiatic belief sys-tems, it is true that certain non-Russians have
gone some way toward embrac-ing Roerich, either as an exemplar of
friendly relations between faiths, or even recognizing him as one
of their own. Roerich is a figure of respect among the Buddhists
who worship at the famed Kalachakra Temple in St. Petersburg’s
northern suburbs (Roerich himself was one of the artists who helped
design the temple’s interior during its 1909–1915 construction).
Farther afield, Roerich-ism is popular among the indigenous peoples
of the Altai, where it is often associated with or incorporated
into shamanistic or Ak Jang (Burkhanist) prac-tices, and a similar
dynamic has been observed among Kamchatka’s native
42 See, for example, G. Sviatokhina, “Zhivaia ėtika—aktual’noe
uchenie sovremennosti,” Vestnik
Rossiiskogo filosofskogo obshchestva 38, no. 2 (2006): 138–141.
43 Lunkin, Filatov, “Roerich Movement,” 144, on the Sochi group.
Mialo’s essay “Christ in the
Himalayas” paraphrased in Polonsky, “Letter from Peryn.” 44 On
Dugin, see Alexander Rahr, “ ‘Atlanticists’ vs. ‘Eurasians’ in
Russian Foreign Policy,”
RFE/RL Research Report 1, no. 22 (1992); Vera Tolz, “The Burden
of Imperial Thinking,” RFE/RL Research Report 1, no. 49 (1992);
David Kerr, “The New Eurasianists: The Rise of Geopolitics in
Russia’s Foreign Policy,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 6 (1995). See
also Mark Sedgwick’s chapter in this volume.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 367
Itelmen. The Roerich group in Kazan is engaged in an interesting
hybridiza-tion of Agni Yoga and Sufism, and, outside the country,
Roerich’s 1926–1927 residence in overwhelmingly Buddhist Ulan Bator
has recently been com-memorated by the transformation of his
quarters into a house-museum, with support from the Mongolian
government.
This sort of receptivity is most prominent and heartfelt in
India, where the Roerichs’ connections with the Nehru-Gandhi and
Tagore clans are still re-membered fondly, and where Roerich, in
1979, became one of only nine indi-viduals—and the only
non-Indian—to be named a “National Treasures Artist.” As noted
before, the USSR had stressed these ties during the Cold War, and
the Putin regime lost no time in exploiting them as part of its
larger strategy of asserting a more muscular presence on the world
stage than the Yeltsin gov-ernment had managed to do. Russia’s
ambassador to India, Alexander Kada-kin, long an admirer and
promoter of Roerich, has served as the deputy direc-tor of India’s
International Roerich Memorial Trust, and, with the assistance of
no less than President Putin’s wife Liudmila, he played a mammoth
role in organizing a December 2002 exhibition of Roerich’s work in
New Delhi, at the National Museum of India.
Putin himself has referred to Roerich as an example of “the
spirit of close-ness that binds all people”: an excellent
illustration of how those who praise him as a paragon of russkost’
are often just as ready to use him as a symbol of “boundless
internationalism” when it suits their purposes.45 This is not
always cynicism—the Roerichs’ own writings, after all, provide
ample backing for both views—although the contrast with nationalist
strains of Roerichite ideol-ogy is sometimes jarring. Whatever the
case, Roerich’s name has appeared with surprising frequency in
civic and academic discussion of international relations and new
directions in foreign policy. Mainly, he has been cited by
political scientists and strategic thinkers in Russia looking for
models of “multipolarity” and “global pluralism” to counter U.S.
hegemony and seemingly triumphalist or confrontational political
theories from the West, such as Francis Fuku-yama’s “end of
history” thesis or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”;
here, Roerich appears in the same company as other
“internationalist” think-ers, such as Pitirim Sorokin, Sun Yat-sen,
and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.46
45 Putin quote from India Today cited in Markus Osterrieder’s
chapter in this volume; “bound-
less internationalism” comes from Lunkin, Filatov, “Roerich
Movement,” 142. 46 See Andrei Tsygankov, Whose World Order?
Russia’s Perception of American Ideas after the
Cold War (South Bend/Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2004),
94–95, 87–112, 163.
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368 John McCannon
(As noted above, Roerich has, paradoxically, been claimed as a
kindred spirit by neo-Eurasianists whose aspirations are decidedly
less ecumenical).
These internationalist views have generally been voiced outside
the con-fines of the Roerich movement. Still, anything that earns
the artist more ap-probation works to his followers’ benefit, and
most Roerichite organizations have echoed this rhetoric whenever
possible. On numerous occasions, the MTsR has taken advantage of
its UNESCO status to boost Roerich’s visibility at the United
Nations, trying to have him acknowledged as a humanitarian and
peacemaker on par with Dag Hammarskjöld or Albert Schweitzer. This
exer-cise has yielded meager results, as Roerich continues to be
poorly known or perceived as an oddity by those outside his natural
constituency. With evident pride, the MTsR displays a large
photograph of UN General Secretary Kofi Annan being presented with
a flag stamped with Roerich’s Banner of Peace emblem. How justified
that pride is, though, remains open to question: al-though it may
be a trick of the camera, the non-Roerichite viewer cannot help but
be struck by the nonplussed look on Annan’s face—a small amusement
illustrating a more significant dilemma. Concluding Remarks
All signs indicate that, for the foreseeable future, the
Roerichs’ fame will con-tinue to flourish in Russia. The
celebration of Nicholas and (to a lesser extent) Sviatoslav as
artists of note is unlikely to abate, nor is there much chance that
George’s scholarly reputation as an orientalist will dim. A casual
survey of Russian bookstores, whether in Moscow and Petersburg or
in Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, shows right away the wide acceptance
Helena has gained as an author of ezoterika and, increasingly with
the passing years, as a philosopher in her own right.47 Even
Roerich’s poetry, particularly his Flowers of Morya collection
(1907–1921), is working its way slowly into the Russian literary
canon.48
By no means, however, does renown in a generalized sense
translate auto-matically into religious appeal, and the future of
the Roerich movement is more difficult to predict. Over the course
of almost two decades, the MTsR has 47 For instance, Mikhail
Maslin, ed., Russkaia filosofiia (Moscow: Algoritm, 2007), 468–469,
is
one of several encyclopedias or general histories that give
Helena Roerich serious consider-ation as a member in the canon of
Russian thinkers.
48 Verses from Roerich’s Flowers of Morya (Tsvety Morii) poems
can be found in Russkaia poeziia. XX vek: Antologiia (Moscow: OLMA,
1999), 61–62, while N. K. Rerikh, Pis’mena (Moscow: Profizdat,
2006), was released as part of a major “Poetry of the Twentieth
Century” series.
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The Roerich Movement(s) in Post-Soviet Russia 369
turned itself into Russia’s, if not the world’s, single most
powerful Roerichite institution—and yet its goal of monopolizing
control over Roerichite doctrine and practice remains far out of
reach: various and sometimes radically differ-ent strains of Agni
Yoga exist throughout Russia and the regions neighboring it, some
outright hostile to the MTsR and many feeling no need to pay
alle-giance to it. Especially now, in an era so enormously shaped
by information and social-networking technology, diversity and
individualized syncretism appear to be the wave of the future for
Roerichism, as for most New Age sys-tems of belief. Nor is it
particularly clear which conception of Agni Yoga will prove
dominant in the end. Will Russophilia win out over universalism, or
vice versa? Or will the coexistence of both continue?
At certain points throughout his career, Roerich appears to have
antici-pated such unpredictability, posing the following question
in his 1935 essay The Builder (Stroitel’):
Can the sower know for certain how the seeds he has sown will
grow? The sower may suppose, but it is not given for him to know.
The builders of wondrous temples and fortresses never knew whether
they would be destined to complete their work.49
One would dearly love to have the opinion of Roerich himself on
the MTsR, and on all the many disputes that have been fought in
(and over) his name for so long. About such things we can only
speculate, but the sole certainty is that, when Roerich dreamed of
the temple he hoped someday to leave behind, he dreamed of one, not
many. Unfortunately for him, the probability that a true and single
church of Agni Yoga will ever materialize in Russia remains just as
remote now as it did in his and Helena’s lifetimes.50
49 N. K. Rerikh, “Stroitel’,” Listy dnevnika (1931–1935)
(Moscow: MTsR, 1999), 536. 50 Such a development may be more likely
in the Baltic states, where, according to researcher
Anita Stasulane, public discourse regarding the Roerichs and
their spiritual views has become increasingly orthodox and
dogmatic, with significant support from the state and its
educa-tional institutions. July 2009 conversation between Birgit
Menzel and Anita Stasulane, relayed to the author in September
2010.
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